If we have had little difficulty in locating examples of the use of the term saddharma-pratirūpaka (and of the two-part timetable with which it eventually came to be associated) in Buddhist scriptures composed in India, matters are altogether different when we come to the third dispensation in the history of the Buddhist religion, known in East Asian sources as mo-fa (Jpn. mappō). Though the term itself appears in a number of sūtras translated into Chinese from Indian originals, it is not at all clear what Sanskrit Buddhist term —if any—can properly be described as its antecedent. Moreover, though the idea of a three-part timetable of cheng-fa, hsiang-fa, and mo-fa is so ubiquitous in East Asian Buddhist writings that much of the history of Buddhism in this region would be incomprehensible without it, it has proved singularly difficult to find examples of such a three-part scenario in any Buddhist source of certifiably Indian origin.

If mo-fa cannot be viewed simply as a translation of a well-known Sanskrit technical term, we must turn directly to the Chinese Buddhist literature in our attempt to determine its significance. Restricting our inquiry at this point to those texts translated from Indian originals (both in order to focus on the point of entry of the term into Chinese Buddhist usage and to continue our attempt to establish its proper Indian antecedent, if any), we will begin by tabulating the occurrences of the term in the first seventeen volumes of the Taishō canon —that is, in the Agama, Avadāna, and Mahāyāna sūtra literature. …

In sharp contrast to what we might expect, the above list shows not a multitude of texts in which hsiang-fa and mo-fa appear in conjunction, but quite the opposite. With only a handful of exceptions … either hsiang-fa or mo-fa may appear in a given text, but not both.

[W]e should also take note of another important fact: that is, that in the entirety of the first seventeen volumes of the Taishō canon, comprising 847 separate scriptures and totaling over 16,000 pages of printed text (that is, approximately 25,296,000 Chinese characters), only 22 individual works containing the term mo-fa are registered in the Taishō index. Moreover, in virtually all of these cases the term appears only once in a given text, rather than being used repeatedly and serving as a major topic of discussion in its own right. While there are undoubtedly other occurrences of the term that have escaped the notice of the indexers, the overall trend is quite clear: this expression is as rare in the canonical sūtra literature as it is ubiquitous in the East Asian commentaries.